Kernel Panic on HP A500 with Debian 3.1, RAID 1 /boot
I tried installing Debian 3.1 on my HP A500 with software RAID1
enabled for /, /boot, and /var but the install failed. So, I decided
to do it the old fashioned way and install the system, create degraded
RAID sets, then copy the system over, and reboot (a la the RAID 1 Root
HOWTO http://www.parisc-linux.org/faq/raidboot-howto.html).
Everything looked okay (all the devices were found properly) until the
kernel paniced when it tried to "pivot_root".
Through my online research, the error "pivot_root: no such file or
directory" is caused when the system is ready to get off of the initrd
image and actually start using the disk but it can't find the
directory /initrd. I'm assuming it can't find the directory because
it's not properly finding/reading my RAID 1 set. I went back and
looked at the initrd image and saw that it did have the md and raid1
kernel modules in the proper directory. I didn't see anywhere that
they'd been loaded, though, so I updated /etc/mkinitrd/modules to list
md and raid1 and built a new initrd image. After rebooting, I saw
that md had started and raid1 registered itself, but still got a
kernel panic.
Does anyone know why my RAID 1 sets wouldn't be seen by the initial
startup of Linux? I can boot just fine on a normal disk with the
stock 2.6 kernel that comes with Debian 3.1. When I try to boot from
a RAID 1 device with the same kernel and everything, it panics.
Also, I don't know if this means anything or not, but when I boot from
the normal SCSI disk (without RAID), everything boots without user
intervention. When I try to boot from the RAID drive, I get the
prompt asking if I want to change any of the boot parameters or to
press "b" to boot with the defaults.
--
PC Drew
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